Made of Imagination / Homemade Instrument Submissions

This is where your submissions to our “Made of Imagination” project with MTVand Sony Xperia will be posted! Remember you have until September 26th to submit to this project! There are sweet prizes up for grabs but you should just do it because it will be fun!

The Cellotar is a homemade hybrid guitar/cello that can be played seated or standing. It is tuned like a guitar and has a 2-octave fretted neck made from a PVC pipe, a hollow body made from plywood and a reclaimed old piano lid, and a dual-piezo pickup system with a standard 1/4″ output jack.

Makeshift Music consists of three interactive sculptures constructed out of reused and recycled materials. With the participation of the viewer, each piece becomes a musical instrument that can be played individually or as a collective assemblage of sounds in a junk pile jamboree!

Kate Szabo – Guelph, Ontario

Drum Phil is an analogue drum sequencer built from a modified reel to reel tape player. Paper disks can be played with preprogrammed rhythms or the stylus mounted tape heads can be removed and used to manually tap out beats by touching the coloured dots. The data stored on credit cards and train tickets etc is what creates the sound.

After having two vintage Gibson guitars stolen after a show he decided he would never buy another guitar. Instead he started to build acoustic and electric guitars out of old vintage suitcases! He has even built electric foot drums from the suitcases as well!

“Phonograph” – Contact mics inside the broom head amplify the sounds of the bristles playing over the log. The bristles act like a needle on a record player, or keys on a music box. The song is determined by the density of texture on the surface of the rotating log.

“Noisy Cauliflower” – The electrical resistance between the player, holding one end of the circuit, and the vegetable attached to the other end produces a variety of blips, whines and other electronic sounds.

“Modified Typewriter” – Typewriter modified with strings and amplifier to play music when the keys are struck.

Pijin. An experimental lamellaphone, using a wooden clock housing for the body and anti-roosting pigeon spikes as tines.

Lockbox. An xperimental lamellaphone, basically a big thumb piano, using a lockbox for the body and twisted wire for the tines. It also is set up with a 1/4 inch jack and piezo pickup.

RP Collier – Portland, Oregon

An 8 string guitar with hand made pickups, and thumb-pianos built from bicycle spokes, yard rakes, and other stuff. There’s also a suitcase kick drum and a foot powered hi-hat/tambourine/snare combo instrument.

Ryan Gregory – Flint, Michigan

Instruments:

Long pieces of wood with about 850 metal washers attached, all hanging from the ceiling. A thick metal sheet with a handle attached to wobble back and forth. Copper foil sheets cut into triangles, taped on the edges with duct tape, and hung on the wall to make a loud crashing noise when hit. Tuning forks, and a sandpaper wall.

Musicians:

Dana Riley, Frank Scott Kruger, Sean Stevens, Bradley Jacobsen.

Scott Lingner – San Diego , California

Copper wire, neodymium magnets, and screws. The body was made from part of an old fence about to be thrown in a skip.

Rachael Gater – London, England

A tribute to Jimi Hendrix’s “Electric Ladyland”. A woman-guitar hybrid.

Kacper Cezary Dzialak – London, UK

This is an electric hybrid of a Venezuelan cuatro and a Cuban tres. I kept the traditional cuatro tuning of ADF#B and doubled the outside courses, allowing a player to strum it like a percussive cuatro, or pick montuno lines like a Cuban tresero.

Roberto Bonaccorso – Seattle, Washington

The pause synth always emits sound from any sound emitting devices put in the jars (iphones, dictaphones etc) and by pressing down on the lids, making the jars airtight you are playing it, silencing notes rather than making them, thus playing the pauses between notes. The score is a long roll of paper on a rotating moter, spinning the same bpm as the song. It has sections cut out where you want a note to be silenced. There are mounted torches corresponding to each jar, so when a cut out section passes a torch it shines up illuminating the jar so you know when to press. Close it and silence the note.

Coffee tin with a tik wood neck and a rosewood fretboard. Tuners from a standard guitar and the nut is bone.

Andreas Koutepas – Athens, Greece

‘Graphics Speak’ is about translating graphic to sound, it consists of a collection of graphical patterns that can be turned into sound. Every pattern has its own sound and various composition can be made by mixing the patterns on a turntable. The whole installation is in a darkroom, by broadcasting live video recording of the patterns on the analog television, the transmitted electromagnetic waves will be translated into sound by using a sensor.